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In "June-tree: New and Selected Poems 1974-2000,"
(HarperCollins 2001) Peter Balakian has given us a welcome
collection of his past and present poetry. Balakian, who won the
1998 New Jersey Council for the Humanities Book Award for his
stunning memoir, "Black Dog of Fate," increasingly sees
the world through an ever-present palimpsest of history.

His chronology in "June-tree" begins with the present
and wends its way back to his early poems. Thus we are hooked by
the power of his current work, and we can trace his development
back to the lyricism of his earlier work.

Now Balakian compares the darkness of the night air where you
see and hear nothing, "Just yourself/ staring back at you/ in
middle age,// as if the novocaine/ of the sea urchin/ froze your
lids. ("Photosynthesis").

Hanging over everything in his poetry is the pall of the 1915
Armenian Genocide. His "In Armenia, 1987" leaves the reader gasping
at the intensity of the poetry; he rips the veil of time, and as he
literally digs with his hands in a basalt cavern, he says, "I found
a way/ to the dry clay// of the border,/ where a scimitar/ cut the
horizon."

With poets such as Balakian to keep the world's memory alive,
Turkey can never achieve the silence it has hoped for on the
genocide. These images permeate "Night Patio," Balakian's memories
of growing up in Teaneck. His intensity also infuses "Ellis Island,
"where the tide's a Bach cantata…a lamentation of white opals…" and
there is "…a porcelain cup blown into the desert-/ stockings that
walked to Syria in 1915…"

For another wrenching touch of reality, read the poem "Harpert,
Revisited."

Included from the 1996 collection "Dyer's Thistle" we have the
poem "August Diary." "…How does an image stay?" Balakian asks, "or
is it always aftermath?/ the way deep black reflected the most
light in Talbot's first calotypes." With bitter humor in "My father
on the Berengaria, 1926," he tells us "Constantinople floated away
like the sun/ on cups of waves the color of pee."

Even as a child in Teaneck, Peter Balakian was surrounded by the
detritus of the Armenian disaster, though he didn't know the real
meaning of the strange undercurrents in his home until he was a
young man: witness his deeply affecting "The Oriental Rug."

His conscious linkage of the larger theaters of history to his
own family history make "June-tree" a collection to savor. In it we
mourn with him for the wrongs perpetuated by humans on each other
throughout the ages.

Jersey Poet

Robert Pinsky, New Jersey's former poet laureate, has another
book of poetry for us. "Jersey Rain," (Farar, Straus &
Giroux, 2000) celebrates the power of submarines, a pink piano, the
alphabet, computers, and televisions. If you want to be shaken out
of your ordinary vision of mundane objects, "Jersey Rain"
is the book to do it.

In "Vessel," Pinsky likens his body to a submarine, "A crowded
vessel, a starship or submarine/ Dark in is dark element, a
breathing hull…" Pinsky's poetry is full of words that play on each
other, give birth to breathtaking juxtapositions that give skewed
life to each other. He is never above word play: in "ABC," the
first of its twenty-six words begins with "A"; the last word is
"zenith." In between the two is a life heading for death.

Pinsky's obsession with the power of the alphabet and language
in general continues with "An Alphabet of My Dead," a long free
verse more like prose than verse. It is balanced by the more
powerful "The Haunted Ruin," an homage to machines. One has to
smile at his portrayal, in "To Television,"

"a box a tube…" as a "terrarium of

dreams and wonders…/cotillion of phosphors/ or liquid crystal."
Pinsky celebrates life

in the flow of every day.

Pinsky has also written "The Sounds of Poetry" as an intense
course for the poetry lover on how to interpret and enjoy poetry.
The chapter on the underlying similarities between blank verse and
free verse is especially helpful.

A new Inferno

Saving the most impressive new work for the last, we have Robert
Hollander and Jean Hollander's excellent translation of Dante's
"The Inferno."

(Doubleday, 2000) Dante's "Commedia" has fascinated and
satisfied readers ever since it was written in the 1300's. Like
other classics, "The Inferno," one-third of the "Commedia," is a
child of its times, then turbulent and chaotic in northern Italy.
The Hollanders translation of "The Inferno" will be followed by
their translations of "Purgatorio" and "Paradiso" in 2002 and
2003.

Robert Hollander gives us an introduction and commentary that
reflect the depth of his 40 years of Dante scholarship, as well as
his many years teaching and extensive writing on Dante. The poetic
vitality of the translation is attributable to Jean Hollander, a
poet, and her fluency and use of multi-layered words.

A scholar's joy in the Hollanders' work is increased by having
the Italian and English texts on facing pages. Links also exist to
the Princeton Dante Project (www.

princeton.edu/dante) and to the exhaustive database of the
Dartmouth Dante Project. Robert Hollander also gives us a plethora
of line notes, which can be used or not as the reader wishes.

Robert Pinsky also translated "The Inferno." But because he
writes in a verse form similar to Dante's, instead of the free
verse that Jean Hollander used, he must struggle to stay in this
form, and it shows in his more earthy, contemporary language
translation. He frequently runs over lines with his thought,
causing some difficulty with clarity, something not a problem in
the newer translation.

For example, in Canto XXVIII, Pinsky says of the split-in-two
shade of Mohammed, "I saw his organs, and the sack that makes the
bread/ We swallow turn to shit." Having the line split between
"bread" and "We swallow" causes some confusion.

In Jean Hollander's translation, we read, "I saw/ the innards
and the loathsome sack/ that turns what one has swallowed into
shit." This is certainly an improvement.

Reading "The Inferno," we are always reminded that in Hell we
will have our sins intensified or symbolically changed to be
torture. The punishment will never end. The Hollanders give us the
whole world of Dante's Tuscany as well as his Hell; we suffer with
the damned and we take pity on them.

If you can read this encyclopedic, graceful translation of "The
Inferno" and not be drawn into its spell, waiting for the other
forthcoming translations from the Hollanders, you are a stronger
person than I am.

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